


The problem with nothingness story endings

by Angelwinged_bish



Category: The Perks of Being a Wallflower - All Media Types
Genre: Bipolar Disorder, Daddy Issues, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Mental Health Issues, Suicidal Thoughts, a story with a bad ending, fuck family man
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-26
Updated: 2021-02-26
Packaged: 2021-03-17 17:23:09
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,595
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29720658
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Angelwinged_bish/pseuds/Angelwinged_bish
Summary: When someone’s story ends in nothingness you don’t get to see how they turned out or if they ever got better because their story doesn’t end, things just cease to happen and the writer gives up on them.This is a life story that follows someone who just wants an ending but the writer gives up on them
Kudos: 1





	The problem with nothingness story endings

Starting from the beginning… there is no beginning that I remember. A question people ask me is “What’s your favorite childhood memory?” The response they’re looking for is about how you had the best childhood friend, or how you got a puppy when you were seven. My father asked me this the other day and I had to lie and tell him it was playing on my elementary school playground. But I don’t remember that playground, when I try to think back mostly what I get are blanks. If I were to answer his question truthfully it would’ve been that I don’t remember much. I have no clue what my childhood was like except for a couple memories and based on those i’m glad that’s all that stuck around. Thinking back as far as I can I can’t remember anyone hugging me, it may have happened when I was young but it stopped. Something I do remember- kissing my dad goodnight, once, just one time in our old dark brown room sitting on the metal coffee table. That’s it, that’s the only good memory. But I don’t remember the moment it clicked in my brain not to hug him anymore.   
It must have been when I understood enough to deem him no-longer the good guy just because he was my dad, but the bad guy. He got mad when he was called the bad guy, saying we made him be that way, but never in my memories were he the good guy. Maybe as a little girl I would’ve hugged the good guy. At what point does a little girl change him in her mind to the villain of her story? It could be when she is five and being screamed at for crying because she doesn’t know where mommy is or when she learned that she couldn’t make any noise when she went about her day. Maybe it’s when she’s seven and comes home screaming through tears that he makes the sport she used to like not fun anymore. Tells him that he makes her feel worthless, like she can’t do anything right. Then when she asks him what she’s doing that’s not good enough he grabs her by her shoulders to shake her telling her that she can’t quit, she needs to man up and get better. After he yelled at her some more and left, she collapsed onto the tile in the kitchen knowing nothing she ever did would be enough. Her mom had to pick her up and clean her up while telling her that he was just in a bad mood, that he really does love her and that she needed to stick with soccer because she loved it and because it kept her looking so skinny. Was that little girl broken when he tore her down before she was even built? Is it when she’s eight and gets distracted from watching the dog so she gets a pee stained and wet blanket shoved in her face, when she gets yelled at loud enough for all the neighbors to hear how bad of a kid she was, the blanket shoved in her face again cause it’s her fault, then told to stay outside with the dog. He left her outside crying and thought she would still think of him as someone good. When she was nine and crying in bed telling her mother that she couldn’t do it anymore, she didn’t want to exist, to just please make it stop- the mother got counselling for herself to deal with the confession and left the daughter with the wise words of to try and continue what she was doing, that she was almost to the level to make him proud and that she was oh so skinny so she had to already have the great life. Countless times over the years she’s cried herself to sleep knowing she wasn’t enough, but she always tried to be better for him-she kept trying. She kept trying to be good enough for him but she never was, she eventually gave up. It would’ve been somewhere in there that she stopped thinking of him as good, that’s when she stopped hugging him.  
But not hugging someone doesn’t fix your problems. Trying to distance yourself only lasts so long, you can’t be away at school all the time. What else do I remember? The little girl being twelve sitting in the corner of her room on the floor hiding under her zebra bedspread, crying, not wanting to exist anymore, close to the time she realized that she shook with heart-stopping fear when her name was yelled. Being thirteen, laying on the cold tile floor, over it all, she couldn’t think about him anymore so she stabbed herself with a pen until she was bleeding and numb because she couldn’t take feeling anymore. Being fourteen and making her first cut. She was scared, so scared, but she didn’t care. She didn’t want to feel anymore, she wanted just a little bit of a break. She did it over and over until it was dripping down her arm. What her main concern was- she can’t get blood on the carpet or he’ll get mad. She had no clue what she was doing and looking back she could've accidentally ended it all yet she could only think about not making him mad. It continued but she hid it well.  
She wanted someone to notice so that they’d help but she couldn’t risk him finding out.  
I remember being fifteen, fifteen when I couldn’t take it anymore. That little girl needed out, to make it stop, she figured no-one would care, she wasn’t anything to anyone. So she climbed atop a building and was about to throw herself off. The cutting wasn’t working anymore, carving her feeling away wasn’t enough to numb her. So she stepped up to the edge and there was this whisper of hope- she could finally be done, could finally stop. So she spread her arms and the feeling of free, for the first time ever washed over her. She was on her way off the edge when she thought of her younger sister. The sister that would be left alone with them without the person who had directed as much negative attention away from her as they could. That little girl who collapsed on the roof that day puking to the knowledge that she’d have to stay climbed down three hours later and went home to get yelled at for being out too long. Instead of taking away everything and finally being free she finally had something to live for. Sadly, the person she chose to stay alive for only saw that she was taking the whole family's attention to herself, saw that she was always being helped in sports, saw that she was the “favorite.” What the sister didn’t see was that instead of being an attention seeker, she was taking the heat of everything off your back so that the younger didn’t have to worry about getting in trouble for laughing too loud, when the sister thought she was being helped in sports she didn’t see him shouting the girl’s every imperfection and misstep only to be told she simply wasn’t good enough after any event, when the sister saw that she was the, “favorite” she didn’t see their parents using her to take out each of their hate for the other one against her because they couldn’t on the family because “we have to stay together for you so be grateful.” The person the little girl stayed alive for hated her for how she kept both of them alive. By sixteen the girl was not so little, old pain meds helped numb the nights, getting a little bit of whatever she could find with her friends helped the endless time pass, driving 100 in a 45 helped the wind slice against her face a little better, falling for anyone who payed her the attention she craved was deemed less boring, and she finally had learned to rid herself of all emotions. Months would go by to be later erased from her memory in a never ending cycle. She had to stay alive. But she wasn’t alive; she was present, present in class, present on the honor-roll so that she could escape this town when she graduated, present to not too many places if she didn’t have to. She lived through books that let her escape into a world with witches, werewolves, warlocks, hunters, and vampires. All with their own struggles yet they had an iconic group or a mate whom they would go through life with never leaving them all alone. Being alone is something that grew into a fear for the girl. No matter if the wizard vampire got the mysterious boyfriend, she would have to deal with the drunken slurs, the avoiding of the creaking wooden planks, the comments about her body that no teenager should hear from her parents, the feeling of being ignored from her sister, and the nights that were haunted by something she wouldn’t even call demons because demons could be fought. She wondered how all of her perfectly raised friends could believe in a god that would allow none of them to notice that she was dead inside with a big grin to cover it up when her parents needed her to. One night sitting down with her mother after an argument about college plans she let slip that she had never cared about college because she didn’t think she would make it there. The mother cried that night after threatening to take away her car and all privacy. It was something the girl was doing wrong, she shouldn’t have said anything, the “do you know how this makes me feel” from the mother ensured the girl that it wasn’t going to be about her. The next few weeks included a lot of guilt hugs that made the girl’s skin crawl with the feeling of sweaty, scary memories that she had forever ingrained in her head but she had no other choice but to hug her mom and tell her that it was indeed the girl’s fault for being like this. It included a lot of being yelled at while they were drunk, one in the streets of their neighborhood for all to hear about how the girl was almost selfish enough to ruin the family they had worked so hard to build, to hear how broken her mom thought she was. The girl didn’t speak for over a week and ate so little her hair began to fall out yet when the mother finally asked why she was being so rude and got the replay of what had happened on their street she accused the girl of being over dramatic and said that she was a great mother who would never say that. The same night she was drunk and tore into the girl again but it stopped being brought up. Staying alive started to seem like it was a lot more of an impossible task; suicide prevention hotlines-Ha no, for her sister-the sister wouldn’t give her the time of day and still hated her for their childhood but that was the girl’s fault, and her friends didn’t notice a thing-were they her friends though because every time she flinched at their hugs they looked more and more annoyed.   
Then suddenly the girl was laughing in chemistry class and she missed when it happened but she had met someone who made her feel alive. They would drive with the windows down, blasting music as they terribly sang along with, and arrive at a random destination that became that day’s adventure. By a couple months she had gotten used to simple touched again, she could even be hugged without triggering something. Almost a year in and she felt more comfortable with them than she ever had with anyone else so she told him the tip of the iceberg and everything was rolling smoothly. The girl liked them so incredibly much, fears of messing it up, of making it like her parent’s relationship, of them seeing too much of her arose. Until she was having a weird day, skipping tests, twitching without being able to stop, being completely irritable. That day she snapped at them without reason and as she was struck with the realization that she just acted like her father did she broke a little bit more. She broke-up with the person who had put a smile on her face and excited her about what the next day would hold. In the next six months there isn’t a single memory that can be threaded together but it consisted of random affection from people she barely knew, losing the weight she hated about her body which was almost everything, and adding a lot of scars.   
Nine months later the girl was diagnosed with bipolar depression, along with a large packet that has other words that don’t help her much. Put on medication to stabilize her mood and a therapist to determine what, she doesn’t know. She has random nights that come out of nowhere and leave her immobilized in different ways in the morning. Her parents being disappointed didn’t even phase her, they would always be disappointed so there was no use trying. Of course, it was the girl’s fault. All of it was, she should’ve gotten better, she should’ve just been stronger- I mean come on she was raised with food and a roof over her head it was her fault that she was so weak minded. The months following consisted of steady reminders of this. The pills did stabilize though. I mean when you rid all emotions from the body that’s considered stabilized right? Everyone seemed to like her better like this though, there was no more twinge of hope left. She got up everyday, went to practice, spaced out during class, passed out once she got home, cheated on all her assignments to keep up her grades, then made it through the night just to repeat it all over again. The nights were what changed the most. Before when there was her mind telling her that she wasn’t enough and that she better do something about it, now consists of knowing she’s not good enough but not caring enough to fix it. She only has to stay alive so she doesn’t want to fill the day anymore and take away time from sleeping. Being asleep is the only way to get away from the absolute nothingness that her life has turned into.   
The problem with being in nothingness is that there’s no urge to get out. You’re not even trapped, you just don’t have the motivation to change. You’re stuck and it’s your fault and you know it yet you get up the next day and do the same as the one before. When someone’s story ends in nothingness you don’t get to see how they turned out or if they ever got better because their story doesn’t end, things just cease to happen and the writer gives up on them. The writer doesn’t think the story has potential and gives up on it. Slowly as the side characters start to become less interested and start to leave, the writer looks at what the ending could be and sees no potential. The problem with belonging in the nothingness is that the little girl, who isn’t so little anymore, doesn’t get an ending.


End file.
